EDIT: Thank you all for your answers, now I'm reassured this platform is in good hands and we will always have the freedom to switch. Let's make this place vibrant, diverse and decentralized, like the old web used to be.

I feel like this instance is getting too big and all the content is being centralized here. Am I right or there are other instances thriving too?

Wherever I go I keep seeing lots of lemmy.world users and communities and kind of feel worried about centralization.

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[–] bill_1992@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I've posted about this before and I think a lot of people disagree, but some centralization is good. There has to be a no-thought option for when people want to join Lemmy. After they learn more about federation, they can move on to another instance.

The reason why kbin grew so fast is because for a lot of people, Kbin = kbin.social (See how "kbin" links to kbin.social on: list of alternatives on Reddit)

I believe this also explains Beehaw's growth despite their onerous rules. When someone recommends Beehaw, they don't need to think about which instance of Beehaw they want to join, they just go to Beehaw.

A lot of people are dogmatic about federation, but I quite frankly think that if you are going to die on the hill, don't complain when you die.

[–] Odo@startrek.website 3 points 1 year ago

Isn't beehaw just another Lemmy instance?

[–] overzeetop@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

After they learn more about federation, they can move on to another instance.

Right...but, what if they've created a community (or communities) here on lemmy.world and decide they'd prefer to move on. The communities aren't portable. And I'm not sure how identically named communities co-exist across instances. They clearly could be separate, but co-mingling by identical names...would it cause problems? And by that I mean it would, I just don't know how it gets solved. Also, if I start a community and then abandon that instance, does the community automatically die unless there are other mods?

[–] ewe@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

I think community portability will need to be built into the platform. Without that, we are one bad server owner from losing entire communities. It will inevitably happen at done point.

[–] UnicornKitty@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wouldn't each instance have its own identifier? Like Bengals@lemmy vs Bengals@beehaw

I'm completely new to this concept so I might be thinking the wrong way.

[–] overzeetop@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It does. I’m thinking about new people (likely far less savvy, on average) who are confused by the multiple instances as well as casual users who may think their c/Chicago is pretty small when, in reality, three other instances which have c/Chicago communities were created after they signed up are getting the bill of the traffic. Unless you regularly go search or someone happens to tip you off that there a community on another instance you’d have no idea you were missing most of the action.

It’s great that we have a bunch of technically savvy people quickly building new communities, but the fractured nature will prevent or discourage non-tech-savvy content from ever taking root. Put another way, Corporate control of the internet has dumbed down the average interface and user friction. Otherwise we’ll always just be a bunch of tech nerds - which is cool for things like selfhosted, but probably not as useful for !crocheting or !musicaltheater where the is less overlap with IT personnel. The sad fact is that reddit is easier in this way, and letting them keep/poach the average user is to the detriment of a diverse voice here.

/soapbox 😉

[–] UnicornKitty@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I didn't consider that because I don't search that way. I didn't search for specific communities. Per your example I would have searched "Chi" then slowly added letters until what I wanted came up. Chicago is proper so that doesn't really work. But there are several ways to look for autism related stuff, because it could be autism or autistic or whatever and if you just put in "auti" you get all of it. And since I saw that there can be more than one with the same community name, I know in the next few weeks I will have to keep searching for new ones.

I would rather use my energy to do that than go back to reddit. Not everybody would feel what they did was bad enough to warrant expending that energy. Okay that's not great for diversity but once things settle down it will be pretty close to that easy.